René Worms

“ Science is the study of facts as they are. Art is an effort to organize things as we wish them to be. Art and science to be sure both speak of laws, but with this difference. For science, laws are, according to the formula of Montesquieu, "necessary relations which spring from the nature of things." They are formulas, derived by induction, which sum up the relations of coexistence and of succession found to be constant in the facts studied. For art, on the contrary, laws are a priori precepts, which claim domination over all application and all practice. ”

“ Genetic facts, facts psychical in all their forms,—moral, religious, esthetic, scientific, even political and juridical—exist only by virtue of force which issues from the utilization of wealth. Hence the economic regime of a society impresses itself upon all the remainder of its constitution—upon its genetic constitution, as in the case of the institutional bond between wealth and birth ”

“ This is precisely the service which sociology ought to render. The economic function, which corresponds in society with the function of nutrition in the individual, is without doubt the most rudimentary function, the basis of all others. Nevertheless, if we wish to comprehend its functional action it is necessary to know in addition the structure of the social body in which this function operates—just as to understand the nutrition of an animal it is necessary to know its individual anatomy. ”

“ Sociology is a science only, the general science of societies. It does not wish to be an art, since researches of the scientific order are enough to occupy the sociologists; and practical applications, to be fruitful, must be reserved until later. It is true that, even thus limited, the field open to the sociologist's efforts remains immense.
That which the sociologist has to study is not merely, as in the case of the economist, the facts and the laws pertaining to wealth; it is the totality of societary phenomena. ”

“ Passing to the physiology, the sociologist proposes the question—What phenomena take place in this society? The biologist distinguishes in the individual being a life of nutrition, a life of reproduction, a life of relation. Likewise, with the collective existence, the sociologist will distinguish a life of nutrition, precisely represented by economic phenomena; a life of reproduction, consisting of the genetic phenomena; and a life of relation, which gives birth to morality, art, religion and science. ”

“ But it is upon this conception of natural laws that sociology must build, since sociology—science and not art, we repeat again—is the study of the different aspects under which the activity of men living in society naturally manifests itself. In order that this study might be possible it was necessary that the idea of natural laws should become distinct in turn in connection with the facts of organization and of evolution, moral, religious, intellectual, political and even juridical. ”

“ Economic science, on the contrary, seems to have confined itself somewhat too exclusively, up to date, to the study of facts which occur within the great societies among which we live. We may and we must hope that the influence of the sociological spirit will lead to correction of this narrowness of view, to an interest in economic phenomena in all races and in all environments, to the conception that there are other forms of production, circulation and distribution of wealth than those which we see every day. ”

“ To speak generally, the economists in advance of all others realized that by the side of human laws, due to the more or less arbitrary will of an occasional legislator, there exist natural laws, which are not the work of any individual, but which impose themselves upon all men, and which, whether men will or no, govern the composition, the functional action and the evolution of societies. To distinguish such of these laws as pertain to wealth is the natural aim of economic science. ”

“ Sociology will thus rid political economy of that tempting but impractical dogmatism which has often been its reproach. It will show that this art as well as others must be not dogmatic but experimental. Still more, in making clear that by the side of economic phenomena there occur in society a multitude of others which exert upon each other incessant actions and reactions, it demonstrates that legislative intervention, a modification of the natural order of phenomena, is always a serious affair ”

“ How then is social science born? If we except Aristotle, whose teaching upon this point cannot be reviewed, and certain moralists like La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, who occupied themselves less with formulating doctrines than with observing, we may say that the economists were the first to try, within a particular department of activity, to develop a science of certain social facts. ”

“ Sociology is not content to study all societies, but it proposes to study all classes of social facts in all of these societies. Now the mission of economic science is to examine only a single kind of facts. But it would be very useful to the economist to be able to find in another science a resume of the totality of facts contiguous to those which he makes his specialty. ”

“ And if even the economist can furnish these facts only in the crude state, that is without having succeeded in determining their laws, they are still valuable for the sociologist, for in observing the reactions of the economic facts upon other social activities, the sociologist may come to comprehend the real type to which they belong, the radical law of their correlation and of their evolution, and he may be able in his turn to teach the economist. ”

“ Sociology being a science, we have only desired to present it in its relations to economic science. In closing it is in place to indicate in a few words that sociology should have an equally beneficial influence upon economic art. In extending the field of our researches, in showing us that economic phenomena occur elsewhere in a manner entirely different from ours, sociology will perhaps make us see that the remedies for social evils, the precepts which it will be advantageous to follow in social reforms, should themselves be multifold and should vary with circumstances, times and places. ”

“ An economic law has thus become one of the fundamental principles of general sociology.
But even where economic science has not yet gone so far as to establish laws, where it must at present be content with determining facts, these data, such as they are, have none the less great utility for sociology. Economic facts are, in a word, the foundation of the other social facts. The truth of this is easily perceived. In the individual it is nutrition that makes possible reproduction and thought. In society it is the same. ”

“ And in the first place, what is exactly the contribution of political economy to sociology. We do not hesitate to assert that the construction of the science of political economy has alone made it possible for us to dream of constructing sociology. As we have seen, sociology is the scientific study of social facts considered in their generality. But who were the first to study social facts scientifically? The economists. In all departments of human activity, practice, that is art of a rudimentary sort, has preceded science. ”

“ If these are in a sense derived from the first, it is evident also that once differentiated they acquire an existence of their own, and that they react upon the economic phenomena—just as, in the individual, thought, while posterior to nutrition, exercises upon the latter an indisputable influence. It is thus, for example, that the moral ideas of a people have an important bearing upon the form which consumption assumes; that their juridical system rests upon their production; that in the partition of wealth there may be traced the action of the political organization. ”

“ There exists a solidarity among all the manifestations of social life, and on this account it is necessary to establish a solidarity among all the social sciences. This idea is making its way more and more into the thought of investigators in all countries. It is, in fact, only the recognition of the intimate bond—I might almost say the bond of subordination—which logically attaches economic science to general sociology. ”

“ This will apparently be a great advantage to science, for, in the first place, these inferior civilizations deserve to be known not less than others; a fact, wherever it occurs and however humble it may be, is always a fact and has a claim to be taken into account in every scientific synthesis which purports to be complete. Still further, in order to comprehend our own societies it is necessary to understand rudimentary societies, for our civilization developed out of their barbarism and their savagery ”

“ Now, as we have seen, sociology occupies itself in the beginning with determining the anatomy of the society studied, with describing its double environment—the external or physical environment (soil, climate, minerals, flora and fauna) , and the internal or human environment (race, population, subordinate human groups) . But further, after the economic function come the other functions which we have already enumerated—genetic, moral, religious, political, etc. ”

“ The life of the entire state as a whole, considered in itself, as an organism at once collective and individual, is superimposed upon these individual lives. This civic life is made up of political phenomena. As to juridical phenomena, they are, so to speak, only the crystallization of different orders of precedent phenomena, the common form which facts economic, moral, religious, political gradually receive, when, losing their primitive plasticity, they accommodate themselves to the rigid forms of written laws. ”

“ It seems to us entirely incorrect to confound under one title (that of "economic science") two things as different as the study of real facts and the search for the ideal. For even when it is thought that the ideal is to let things follow their natural course, there is still a radical difference between the speculative interest which attaches itself to the real and the practical interest which seeks for the better. ”

“ All this usually amounts to nothing but a rudimentary praxis; when certain general rules emerge, we may say that an art exists. We cannot say that so far there is science, since what was desired by those who laid down these rules was to produce by the application of them certain social phenomena conformed to their subjective ideas, not a knowledge of social phenomena as they occur spontaneously in the actual environment of the rule-makers. ”

“ Herbert Spencer went further and pointed out that this law controls all the evolution of all social machinery. He showed that it operates in the case of the political, the religious, the juridical organization of societies, that in every case, when these organs develop they divide into different sections, and that each assumes exclusively a part of the work which was at first performed by the whole organism. The same law manifests itself in biology, where the multiplication of organs is always accompanied by their differentiation. ”

“ If we wish to explain our actual modern states, we must study ancient states, and also the inferior contemporary groups which they resemble in so many particulars. It is only by exact knowledge of the past that we can interpret the present and look into the future. ”

“ In all times there have been diverse views which have presided as a sort of authority over the regulation of labor, or over the levying of customs; precepts of conduct have been furnished to men by laws, by religion, by the morality accepted in their country ”

“ On the other hand the economists, the scholars who busy themselves with comparative law, with the history of religions, of art, of moral ideas, or who criticise political constitutions, all these perform a work of systematization upon the data collected with reference to these different orders of facts. ”

“ There was cultivation of the soil before there was botany, there was breeding of animals before there was an attempt at zoölogy. But the practical pursuits of agriculture and the breeding of animals led to scientific study of the nature of plants and animals. It has not been different with the social sciences. Practice and a kind of art are in this sphere also very old. ”

“ The sociologist then limits himself to drawing from these labors and coordinating the most general results. On the one side, social organisms being studied, he has only to classify them and to distinguish the type of each of the groups which they form, according to the complexity of its structure and of its functions. ”

“ In a word these economic facts mark with their impress all other social facts. It is consequently essential to the sociologist that he shall understand these economic facts to begin with, since he cannot otherwise understand any of the other facts which he has to study. ”

“ From all this the conclusion will be derived that important and lasting modifications are to be expected not from a sudden overthrow, however well meaning may have been its authors, but from the natural course of things, from the proper life of the social organism, which in the long run, like the individual organism, knows how to adapt itself in the best possible way to its environment. ”